Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Along His journey to Jerusalem, Jesus stops frequently to have meals, three times with Pharisees (7:37-50; 11:37-54; 14:1-35). Meals were central to Jesus’ ministry. He comes “eating and drinking” (Luke 7:34). While His meals are not just for refreshment, they are opportunities for teaching the protocols of the kingdom. Meals…
Time as a realm of participation can be difficult for us imaginatively to grasp. While music is a profoundly temporal art, exploring the medium of time like no other, most of our temporal experience seems decidedly unmusical in character, disjointed and unorchestrated. The form in which we naturally discover time…
John devotes much attention to Jesus’ burial clothes. He tells us that Nicodemus brought about a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to spice Jesus body, and that He was bound in linen wrappings. We find out that His body and His head were wrapped separately. (John 19:39-40; 20:6-7). When…
Thinking about time in terms of music also helps us to appreciate its unity and inner relations. Henri Bergson observes our cultural habit of dividing time into discrete moments, and conceiving of these as if akin to objects in a spatial succession. [1] Against such a notion, Bergson argues for…
As we attend to these and other aspects of music’s temporality, Begbie suggests, we will find means by which to resist some of our habitual modern ways of conceptualizing time, most especially our tendency to conceive of time as if it were a homogeneous set of technologically quantifiable units laid…
The Hidden Dimension In many fields of scientific study, the apparent complications and contradictions are dispelled once the internal logic is perceived. Biblical hermeneutics is no different, since the author of Creation is the Author of the Word. The Bible’s literary labyrinth radiates organically from an algorithm so simple it…
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Late dating of the gospels is historically preposterous. Even the most “conservative” dating assumes that Jewish Christians, who believed that the long-awaited salvation had finally occurred in Jesus, would wait over a decade before putting an ordered account on paper. On the contrary: The very first thing a Jew would…
Steve Martin, The Pleasure of My Company . New York: Hyperion, 2003. 163 pp. In his second novel, Steve Martin (yes, the actor) tells the story of the “redemption” of Daniel Pecan Cambridge. Daniel is a narcissistic neurotic so frightened of walking off curbs that he maps out a serpentine…
As mentioned in an earlier post, Paul says that God works out salvation through the cross and resurrection so that “God might BE just and the justifier of those who are of the faith of Jesus.” That “be” is crucial; God would not BE just if He did not manifest…
As mentioned in an earlier post, Paul says that God works out salvation through the cross and resurrection so that “God might BE just and the justifier of those who are of the faith of Jesus.” That “be” is crucial; God would not BE just if He did not manifest…
Eucharistic Meditation, Feb 1: Luke 17:26-29 Jesus describes the coming of the Son of Man by comparing it to the coming of the flood in the days of Noah and the rain of fire and brimstone on Sodom in the days of Lot. One of the main points of the…
Exhortation for February 1: Jesus has many things to say about faith in our sermon text this morning. One of the main things has to do with the power of faith: He says that anyone who has faith the size of a mustard seed can say to a deeply rooted…
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